


My Only

by tjmystic



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:02:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjmystic/pseuds/tjmystic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wishing that Neal had died isn't the only secret Emma's been keeping</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Only

My Only   
Rating: PG

Summary: Wishing that Neal were dead isn’t the only secret Emma’s been keeping

Author’s Note: Welp, this one wasn’t planned, my lovelies, but the idea kinda took hold of me and I couldn’t resist. Please don’t kill me.

 

“There was someone else.” 

The fire crackled loudly beside them, but that was the only noise in their spot. All eyes were on her – she could feel it without having to look up. Just like she could feel Neal – and Hook – lean towards her. She tried to ignore the latter. 

“What do you mean?” Neal rasped. 

The shoestring around her wrist seemed to bite into her skin. She forced herself to look away from it, to meet Neal’s eyes, hard as it was to do. That he looked so open, so concerned for her, when he should’ve been jealous or hurt, only made it worse. But she made herself keep looking anyway – she was done with running away. Done with being “lost”.

“I was telling the truth, when I said I’ve always loved you,” she muttered. “But after you left, I… I fell in love, again.” 

Someone took a deep breath beside her, but she didn’t look away to see who. She knew what all of them were thinking anyway, and if she let herself move away from Neal, they’d think they were right. However much she might disagree with Hook sometimes, nobody, not even him, deserved to be strung on like that. 

Neal scooted a little closer, enough that she could reach out and touch his hand if she wanted. She wasn’t really sure if she did yet. “What was his name?”

For a second, just one, she let herself close her eyes. It was still so clear, the curly brown hair and stubble and steel blue eyes. His bad jokes and serious expressions. She didn’t even try to stop herself from smiling. 

“Graham.”

Hook’s breath left him like he’d been shot. Thankfully or not, though, Mary-Margaret and David overrode him. 

“Graham? You were in love with Graham?”

“He was in Storybrooke?” Neal cocked his head, eyes narrowed at her curiously, and she nodded yes as soon as she was able to. “Who was he in our world?”

“According to Henry’s book, the Huntsman. You know, the one Regina sent to kill Sno – mom. I met him before I believed in any of this… stuff, though.” She remembered seeing his wolf on the road as she was leaving town, and laughed. “He arrested me for ‘destroying the local signage’.” 

At that, his smile went cockeyed, and she hated herself for the way her heartbeat got faster. “Wait, he was a cop?”

“Sherriff,” she smirked. “Pretty good one, too. You know, aside from the fact that he hired me as his deputy after arresting me twice.” 

They both laughed at that, quiet things that only each other could really hear. 

In her peripheral, she could see David’s face go ashy, no doubt remembering things the man had done when they were still in the Enchanted Forest. She could saw Mary-Margaret sneak a little closer to her side, too, as if she thought she wasn’t being obvious. 

“You never told me you loved him,” she said softly. “I always thought, but… you never said.” 

Emma still refused to look at her. If she intended to be honest about things now, it wasn’t all about avoiding Hook, either – her confession in the caves was all she’d needed to hear to be reminded how expendable she was when it came to parents. At least this time she couldn’t hate them for it, though – they’d never seen her as a kid, so they’d never had the chance to try and love and then suck at it. They just didn’t know her. 

“I didn’t want to,” she muttered under her breath. “I already thought I’d lost Neal, and that was bad enough. If I admitted that I loved Graham, too, especially after… it would be like admitting that there was something else wrong with me. And I couldn’t handle that.”

Mary-Margaret put her hands to her heart, her mouth already open to give her some platitude about how it wasn’t her fault Graham died she was sure. And maybe in the morning she could deal with that, but not right now. Not yet.

It was Hook, this time, not Neal, who came to her rescue. His voice was surprisingly smooth considering how much rum he’d just swallowed.

“What happened to this sheriff of yours?” 

Her eyes flickered down to the rope on her arm. Just a few words, and it was like he died all over again. It shouldn’t still hurt that much after a year. The only thing that helped was that she was too numb to act out on it. That, and the fact that Regina wasn’t around to hear her.

She took another deep breath and looked once more into Neal’s eyes. “He started to remember. Who he really was and everything before the curse hit. This was way before I started to believe Henry about his book and the fairytales, so I just thought he was going crazy. He kept rambling on about seeing this wolf wherever he went. That… that he couldn’t feel anything, because he didn’t have a heart.” Her hands shivered, and she clamped her short nails down into her palms until she felt blood. The fire suddenly wasn’t enough to warm her skin. “Turns out, he was right. Regina took it after he didn’t do what she told him to. From what I understand, she kept him as her boy-toy after that because he couldn’t get away.”

Something cracked, the fire or a branch. But Emma heard the sound of his breath when he fell to the floor at her feet. How he choked when she tried to bring him back. The way he’d sighed her name when she kissed him, just a minute before his not-real heart stopped beating.

Neal took her arm, the same one where the laces of Graham’s old boots now rested, and that was enough to bring her back. She was in Neverland, not the station. And Neal was the one looking at her, not Graham.

“What happened to him?”

His fingers brushed the end of the shoelace. She didn’t cry, couldn’t, but she held his hand a little tighter, squeezing hard like it would help her get over it. 

“He died in my arms.”

A single tear beaded up in her lashes, just one, but Neal’s other hand was there to catch it, brushing it away before it fell. He didn’t hold her, didn’t tell her he loved her or that everything would be okay. He didn’t smile. But that just made her heart break a little more – after all this time, he was still the only person who knew what she needed, and put that first. Him, and a dead man who loved her with all of a heart that wasn’t even his. 

Hook stumbled to his feet, shaking enough that she worried he’d fall into the flames, and that at last made her look in his direction. He looked drunk. He looked broken. For her sanity, she pretended it was just the rum that put the expression on his face.

“Lucky man,” he drawled. 

There was a pop as he uncorked his flask. He took a final swallow, chugging it like water, then sprawled into the trees, purposely not looking at her anymore. 

Emma rubbed her free hand across her forehead, knocking Neal’s off, and laid back against the dirt, too tired to sit up anymore. She’d never asked for this. She’d never asked for anyone. All she wanted was to be happy, and not loving somebody might be a poor means to achieve that end, but it had worked a lot better than all of… this. Neal, Graham, stupid Hook and his “confession” she hadn’t wanted to hear. She just wanted to go home, and have Henry back where he would be safe. 

For the first time in at least an hour, it struck her that her son was still the most important thing in the world to her. 

A cloud of sand sprung up beside her, and she glanced over to see Neal resting on his side, his eyes still stubbornly fixed on her face. 

“I loved Tamara, too,” he mumbled. “I mean, I wasn’t… I never fell in love with her. But she was there, and I did care about her. I guess it’s not really the same as you and Graham, but I get the loss. I understand losing someone right before your eyes.”

Something about him made her think he wasn’t talking about Tamara anymore. But that wasn’t for everybody else to hear. Maybe it wasn’t for her to hear, at least not yet. That wasn’t the part that surprised her about it, though. What surprised her is how much she didn’t mind. How much faith she had in him that he’d tell her eventually. He could still die on her, still leave her alone again – finding out he wasn’t dead now hadn’t made her forget that. But she still believed in him. 

Disregarding David and Mary-Margaret’s wary glances, the waning fire, and Hook’s muttered curses from wherever in the hell he’d gone to vent, she snuggled into Neal’s arm and rested her head on his chest. He didn’t hesitate to hold her, or keep her close, or brush back her hair like he had when she’d had nightmares in the bug. He was there. 

For the first time in years, she closed her eyes and went to sleep without having to think about it.


End file.
